How to hatch Brine Shrimp

I have read and tried all kinds of different ways to hatch brine shrimp, from very simple time saving methods to spending more time adjusting water chemistry.  It is a job nobody really likes to do, but is essential for the health and success of baby angelfish.  We at Angelfish and More try to give our fellow hobbyist, a good source of information that we have found to be the best and easiest way to hatch brine shrimp.

The first thing you will need is a brine shrimp hatchery.  This hatchery should be coned shape, or close to it.  This allows most of the brine shrimp eggs (cysts) to be suspended and not giving them a chance to settle on the bottom.  We build our brine shrimp hatcheries with a plastic 2 liter pop bottle.  The following are instructions for building the hatchery and how we hatch our brine shrimp.

Building the Hatchery

Take your plastic 2 liter bottle and measure 4 ½ inches from the bottom with a marker. You can remove the label for easy marking and for viewing later.

Cut around the bottle with scissors as straight as possible, you will use both pieces. Caution:  if you are a young child, or have trouble cutting have a parent help you with this step. (You can remove the bottle cap to make it a little easer.)

Once the bottle is cut; make sure the cap is put back on tightly.

Turn the top portion of the bottle over, and insert it into the bottom piece. This is the stand that holds the hatchery upright.  If you are interested in a quality stand, we sell a few varieties at our hatchery products page. Or if you are a little creative, you can build your own.

Measure 1” from the top and mark this with a marker.  This will be your water fill line.

The hatchery is now complete.

Fill your hatchery with cool tap water up to the water line that you made earlier.  This is about 1 quart of water.  By the time the shrimp hatch, the water should be at or close to room temperature.  If your water contains chloramines, add a chloramine remover before adding the brine shrimp eggs.

Add 3 tsp of non-iodized table salt to your hatchery.

Add ½ tsp of cysts or the amount you will use in 24 hours after the shrimp hatch. You can experiment with the amount of cysts, but do not add over 1 tsp. (1 tsp is the max recommended for a quart).  Brine shrimp will lose its nutritional value about 24 hours after they hatch, so plan on this when adding shrimp.

Put in a ridged air line tube down into the neck of the bottle.  Turn the air pump on for a constant supply of air, and enough to mix your shrimp eggs around.

*The cysts will begin to hatch around 10 hours, but for a good harvest wait about 24 hours.

Harvesting the shrimp

After about 24 hours, remove the air line from the hatchery.  Let it sit for about 5 minutes.  Most of the shrimp will settle down into the neck of the bottle.  Using your turkey baster, insert into the neck of the bottle and remove shrimp.

Add this to a clean container.  If more shrimp are needed, repeat step.

Once your shrimp is harvested put the airline back into the neck of the bottle for a later harvest.  The shrimp must remain in suspension at all times when not harvesting.

Empty the contents into a fine mesh shrimp net.

Rinse the container with fresh cool tap water and dump contents into the net.  This will remove any shrimp and salt from the container and rinse off your shrimp.

Turn the net over and rinse back into the container.

*Fill the container to the amount of water you will use, and immediately feed to your fry.

Adding Brine Shrimp to your fry tanks

Add 1 or 2 squirts to each of your tanks.  Keep track of how much shrimp each tank needs. You don't want to over feed your fry. A little bit more often is best.

We run two shrimp hatcheries all the time, and feed four to six.  The large one is for the morning feedings, 6am / 10am and the small one is for the late afternoon feedings 4pm / 8pm.  Once we harvest our shrimp we refill for the next day.

We added tops to our hatcheries to keep any water from splashing out.

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